How's your summer going? I hope it's good! Mine's going really well.. I think Mike's summer is stressed the eff out, but hey, mine's going really well!
We've confirmed most of the dates for our upcoming tour, and will should have the rest confirmed in a few weeks!
The shows are posted at the bottom of this post as well! Hope to see you out at some or, perhaps (!!>??!?!), all of the shows!
Here's a few pics of the barn I've been recording in... It's absolutely amazing here, and also incredibly lonely, but besides facebook and cheap celebrity slam websites I don't have too much to distract me, and am getting lots done..
And I promise ONE more amazing ultra-rad summer update by the end of the month! It's going to be the best update yet, and it's totally awesome, and it makes me all sorts of happy thinking about it!
Oh my! It's a super exciting Animal Nation "I wonder what the heck those guys are up to" update!!
Mike recently moved down the street to Vancouver and has been DJing the city red, MCing random parties and clubs, and writing all sorts of new material.
I've been living in Halifax for the last 3 months, looking for the Wizard, meeting all sorts of amazing people, having tons of awesome adventures and huge jam sessions, and working on new music for a concept album tentatively titled "Every Day In The Life". At the end of the month I'll be driving out to Ontario to set up a studio in a refinished barn to start recording vocals for said album.
Near the end of September Mike and I will be meeting up in Montreal to record more vocals, and prepare for our upcoming tour.
Tour you say?!? Tour indeed!!
Starting October 1st Animal Nation will be touring from Montreal back out West to Whistler over the course of the month. We'll post dates soon! But if you're living in or near or around any sort of Canadian city get stoked now, because we're gonna be partying and drinking and musicing our faces off all over your town real soon.
Hey America!! Don't feel left out! We're planning on heading down your lovely little West coast soon too! We've also got a couple other super secret updates that we'll be revealing in the next little bit. Stay tuned! We've got fun things a'comin'!
Our latest recording "Basti Made Me Do It!" is probably my favourite Animal Nation album to listen to. It doesn't necessarily contain our best material, (although the songs did turn out very nice,) but it was more so the process of creating the songs that makes them seem so special to me.
Last summer our good German friend, Sebastian Hochstein, traveled out to Canada and spent nearly three weeks with us in our home, just a couple hours North of Vancouver.
Sebastian brought with him a CD that had over 30 completed beats that he wanted us to turn in to an EP by the time he left. We ended up making 3 brand new songs, and re-working 3 songs that Mike and I had previously tried to record during our 'Understanding...' sessions.
It was so much fun working with Basti. We clicked. We'd hung out before (Mike and I traveled to Germany a few years ago to do a couple shows out there, and to meet up with people we'd worked on our TimeZone album with), but this was the first time Basti and I got to work together behind the boards.
Back in Canada Sebastian was more than willing to spend countless hours behind mixing boards, tweaking tracks, playing with fx, recording and re-recording vocals in really unorthodox ways, and trying out all sorts of new things that occasionally worked in our favour. We must have spent a solid 9 hours over 2 days just working on the bridge for 'Reason'. It didn't work out the first 8 times we tried recording it, but what I loved about working with Sebastian was that we would try it over and over until it did work. Not until it was 'good enough', because for the most part 'good enough' is the same thing as giving up. We'd try it again and again until our house had mics in the bathroom and the kitchen, wires covering all our windows and exits, and I was screaming through a cardboard tube. All in an effort to get something that we loved, rather than something we deemed 'good enough'.
I learned more about production in those 3 weeks than I had in the previous 3 years.
Thank you Sebastian. I can't wait to head over to Germany to start work on our next project with you.
Check out one of the tracks "Pillow Talk" below. It's a song about what it's like to be a pillow. Or, steam the whole album at CBC Radio 3 here.
Then head over to iTunes, or CamoBear Records to purchase this little ditty. It's the only album we haven't given away for free. It's just that good.
Oh! ps - The incredibly talented and beautiful Paige Harley did the art work for the album. Read her interview with us here, then email her at floating.down [at] hotmail.com to hire her for your next project. She's amazing.
With such lush, dense, yet incredible simple production, it's impossible hear this album and not think it's an instant classic.
Leslie Feist was quoted as saying that on her 2nd album "Let It Die" her and her producer tried to use different instruments on each song, "just because."
On "The Reminder" Feist takes a similar approach, but this time doesn't let her music wander off mid-song as occasionally happened on "Let It Die". The result is that "The Reminder" comes off a much tighter, more 'album-like' album, rather than a collection of individual songs.
Even if you're not a fan of Leslie Feist's dressed up down-tempo folk music, you'd be hard pressed to deny the greatness in the production alone. That and her voice. By golly, can that girl ever sing.
Download the entire album for free here, then go out and buy Let It Die to show your support.
Other great Feist albums include: Let It Die, as well as any of the work she's done with the Broken Social Scene guys, as well as probably a billion other songs she's lent her talents to.
The first album the Gorillaz put out is still my favourite release of theirs.
I love the down-tempo vibe that was created in part by Deltron 3030's very own Dan The Automator. Alongside Dan The Automator is 'Blur' frontman Damon Albarn, who's voice sounds infinitely better here than it did screaming "Waaahoooo!" on 'Song2'. Two of the tracks also feature Deltron himself, including the hit single "Clint Eastwood".
For the most part the Gorillaz' band members change from album to album, so it's easy to accept that each record is essentially a one-off, and won't resemble any of their other output. The same idea makes each record seem more special in the sense that the band doesn't just try to recreate their hit songs with any sort of formula like a lot of mainstream bands tend to do.
Download this album for free here, then head down to your favourite local record shop, and buy Demon Days. It's pretty groovy too.
This album sounds like the thought process of a maniacle-genius-university-professor-turn-hobo-folk-singer.
There is so much going on in these songs, all at once, with so many random and insane "what the shit is that???" noises that it's hard to imagine it could actually sound good. That being said, it does. It very very does.
One of the funniest things about this record is that nearly all of my friends were turned on to it either by their own, or someone else's, wacky-tobacky smokin' parents.
From the second you press play the honky tonkin' Devil's Haircut has you questioning everything you've ever known about pop music (how are they combining an acoustic guitar with multiple samples, and rapping, while not coming off cheesy or contrived?), philosophy (whoa dude, it's a Devil's Haircut in his mind, but I think it looks totally awesome!!), whether or not you've got a devil's haircut (you do), and why does your friend's single Dad have this crazy album with a hay-bale jumping over an oxer on the cover? WTF? (The weed.) Side note - This album is still blowing my mind 14 years later, as Wiki tells me that the mop/hay-bale jumping over the hurdle is actually a real photograph of a Komondor, a Hungarian breed of dog with thick matted fur.
Make sure to download this album for free here, then go out and buy more Beck. Almost everything he's ever put out is great in some way or another.
Classified has always been a huge influence on our music.
In fact, I think earlier this year when Classified released his new music video for 'Oh Canada' it was probably the first time in my life I'd ever felt patriotic. And I don't dislike where I'm from- I really like it here... I'd just never given it much thought until Class went and glamourized the H-E-double-hockey-sticks right out of it!
The first time I heard Classified was when I was going to school out in Halifax. He wasn't a huge name, but he was developing a following, and he put on one of the best hip-hop shows I'd ever seen. Fast forward 8 years later, and he's Canada's biggest rap star, pulling more Canadian tour stops than nearly every other Canadian hip-hopper combined. He's got international distribution deals inked with Sony, and his live act has progressed from great hip-hop to one of the best shows I've ever seen.
All of Classified's albums are good. In fact, he's one of few artists I've heard who's albums keep getting better with every release. He's put out more than 12 albums, and he still hasn't peaked. It's amazing.
This one, Trial and Error, just happened to be the Classified CD that I stumbled upon first. Classified influenced my style so much when I was first starting out that on my first rap recordings you can clearly hear me trying to say 'krr' instead of 'car', and 'doot' instead of 'doubt', and I was definitely guitly of throwing my 'aboots' all over the place.
Download this album for free here, then go buy a couple more, and bask in the awesome that is Classified.
This one was my personal headphone anthem for a solid year and a half.
Other great Classified albums are... all over the place. They literally get better every year, and they've been consistently awesome for the last ten years. Classified.
I'm such a huge fan of the concept album it's silly. I'm such a huge fan of listening to albums that have a flow and a common feeling throughout that I can't actually remember the last time I used the 'shuffle' feature on my WalkmanPod. I love hearing albums that when listened to front-to-back sound as if the artists spent a bit of time arranging the track listing; albums that, when listened to on random, don't quite seem to make as much sense as when listened to from front to back.
I hate it when modern artists say that "the album is dead", because while their singles are flying off the digital shelves, the other 7, non-hit tracks, aren't doing very well. (Here is where I spent way too much time looking for the Rolling Stone article claiming that the Black Eyed Peas are the hot new pop act to catch, because frontman Will.I.Am is the best businessman in today's 'music' industry.)
David Bowie's "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars" not only has an amazing title, but also "tells the incredible story of 'Ziggy Stardust,' the human manifestation of an alien being who is attempting to present humanity with a message of hope in the last five years of its existence. Ziggy Stardust is the definitive rock star: sexually promiscuous, wild in drug intake and with a message, ultimately, of peace and love; but he is destroyed both by his own excesses of drugs and sex, and by the fans he inspired." -wiki
And how.
Download this album for free here, then go buy some Bowie so the RIAA doesn't sue me so hard.
You'd be hard pressed to find better wordsmiths in the music industry than the Cunninlynguists. Their name says it all. They make puns out of puns, then use double entendres to make you both laugh and think at the same time.
The Southern-State duo (turn trio, turn duo, turn trio) not only write and record everything themselves, but also make nearly all of the music for their albums as well. Although, while producer/emcee Kno has been labeled as "one of the top loop miners east of the Mississippi", his style has progressed significantly in later albums, which include hired studio musicians, and more complex arrangements. This new, less loop-based style comes to fruition on the Cunninlynguist's third album "A Piece of Strange."
So, while I do enjoy their later albums more than I do their first two, the fact that I heard "Will Rap For Food" first, the fact that their wordplay on this album is unmatchable, and the fact that it contains possibly the best hip-hop sample in all of the world (video below), makes this album one of their most influential.
Help me. I think I've fallen... in love with a 23 year old gypsy from the 60's.
Up until recently, I'd always thought of Joni Mitchell as the female version of Bob Dylan. Not only is she an amazing singer/song-writer and genre crossing folk-rock trailblazer, but she's also one of the best lyricists I've ever heard.
Later on, after discovering Canadian indie band Metric, I'd always picture Joni as a 60's version of Emily Haines. They both write incredible songs and lyrics, they're both amazing singers with huge vocal ranges, and they're both ridiculously good looking.
Ridiculously good looking.
Make sure to download this album for free here, then go buy a couple of her other albums. Joni's one of the few artists that deserve a new pool.
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